The AquaLab conducts research on large-scale distributed systems and networking. Its approach is mainly experimental, focusing on the design, deployment, and evaluation of systems that people use. This lab is headed by Fabián Bustamante.

The Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory strives to advance human ability through robotics autonomy by easing the burden of controlling assistive machines. This lab is headed by Brenna Argall.

Research focuses on code compilation challenges for both energy efficiency and performance on commodity processors. These challenges are addressed by co-designing compilers, the computer architecture of the platform they target and programming languages. This lab is headed by Simone Campanoni.

The Delta Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab and design studio at Northwestern University. Its driving mission is to improve the way we design, work, learn, play, and fundamentally change the way we interact. This lab is headed by Haoqi Zhang.

The Prescience Lab conducts a range of experimental computer systems research with a current focus on virtualization, empathic systems, and parallel and distributed systems. This lab is headed by Peter Dinda.

The research of this group includes efforts to both create new kinds of cognitive systems and model human cognition. It has strong collaborations with other cognitive scientists in a number of fields at various institutions. This group is headed by Kenneth D. Forbus and Tom Hinrichs.

Research interests interests include advancing the control and design of multi-robot systems, enabling their use instead of traditional single robots and to solve problems for which traditional robots are not suitable. Using these multi-robot systems can offer more parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance when compared to a traditional single robot. The lab is interested in investigating how new technologies will allow for more capable multi-robot systems and how these technologies impact the design of multi-robot algorithms, especially as these systems begin to number in the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of robots. This lab is headed by Michael Rubenstein.

TIDAL Lab is a team of designers, artists, learning scientists, and computer scientists at Northwestern University. Its research creates and studies innovative technology-based learning experiences. This lab is headed by Michael Horn.

Theoretical computer science looks at fundamental questions about computation by creating formal models of computation and understanding the resources needed to solve general and specific algorithmic questions. TCS studies the design of efficient algorithms and understanding the computational complexity of various computational tasks that arise in computer science, statistics, economics and the other sciences.

The major research areas include design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity, randomness in computation, combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, online algorithms. The theory group at Northwestern also has strong interests in using computation as a fundamentally new lens to study other fundamental sciences, leading to areas of algorithmic game theory, machine learning and bioinformatics.